Friday, April 28, 2017

dusty, paciorek, baylor, and the hulk

i'm trying to catch up with the 30-day baseball card challenge, so here are a couple more days worth of posts.

day 7 was supposed to feature a card you bought in person and the story behind it. one of the many many many cards that fit that bill is this 1971 topps tom paciorek rookie card

shortly after i started collecting cards in 1978 - right after i completed the topps set from that year - i became a team collector trying to finish off the dodger team sets dating back to 1970. it took me about 17 years to finish that task, with rich allen's 1971 topps card being the last one i obtained (things were much more difficult before the internet). that in person purchase has a story that i've told before, so i'll talk about another tough card from 1971 instead. we had one card shop in town when i started collecting. then another popped up around 1984. there was another shop about an hour away in santa barbara, but we didn't get there too often. my dad took me to a couple of card shows, including the national in anaheim once, but this card was always either not in stock in any of those places, or it had a premium price because of dusty baker being a dodger fan favorite and don baylor being the american league mvp as an angel. such was life living in socal. the kicker was, i wanted the card because of the guy in the middle who was wasting away in seattle and later the south side of chicago.

when we would go on vacations, my parents would often drive my brother and i to comic and card shops, so long as we didn't complain too much about slogging through antique stores and cemeteries (my dad was researching genealogy stuff, again, this was before the internet). anyway, sometime circa 1982, we were up visiting some relatives in san jose - giant territory - and my dad and i went to a card shop there. i offered to pay $12 for the card which had no additional regional value to the guy behind the counter up in nocal, and the card was mine. i stared at it all the way back to my cousins' house. and then we went waterskiing. the end.

actually, not the end, as i will add another day's card into this post.

day 8 was supposed to feature a card that reminds you of a family member. the two cards that remind me most of family members are the 1966 topps jim lefebvre card, and the 1971 topps brooks robinson world series card. i've written about both of those before (the lefebvre card was the subject of an early blog bat around post, and the robinson card was the first 'tatooine' card dubbed as such by my brother and i back in the late 70's), so i'll go with bill bonham's 1978 topps card

this card also reminds me of my brother, who had a slight allegiance to the reds back in the late 1970's. as such, i would show him cards of reds that i pulled from the packs that i opened. when i showed him the bonham card, he took it from me and said that bonham had 'hulk' hair. he was right. bonham's hair did resemble the wig that lou ferrigno wore on the cbs television series 'the incredible hulk'

which was airing at the time that this card was issued. my brother went further into conspiracy theory mode, noting that bill bonham had the same initials as mild mannered scientist bruce banner, the hulk's alter-ego, who was played by another 'bb', bill bixby. it was all very curious. at any rate, we figured that we wouldn't like bill bonham when he's angry.